~ Quick thoughts from my Bible reading

Tag Archives: Obedience

There can hardly be a more familiar story in the Bible than that of Jonah, can there? Yet the teaching series my church is in at the moment has really revealed some things to me that I’d never seen before.

I hadn’t noticed that the sailors at first refused to do what Jonah told them. It reminds me of the stories in the New Testament when people come to Jesus and ask ‘What must I do to be saved?’ He tells them, and they go away sad, because that seems too hard.

The sailors here ask ‘What must we do?’ They are given the answer, but they decide to keep rowing instead – they had given up all hope – rowing wasn’t helping, in fact, the storm had even got rougher since they had originally given up hope of a human solution (see v11) – but they decided to give it one last try anyway.

That’s fair enough when the ‘remedy’ is that you’re going to have to kill someone in cold blood (though the sermon pointed out that actually Jonah could have jumped into the sea himself – there’s no reason he had to make the sailors do it), but it’s worth pondering that so often when we ask God what to do, he tells us, and we still keep trying it in our own strength anyway.

And of course, Jonah could have just repented, asked God’s forgiveness and gone back to what he was supposed to be doing – but then we wouldn’t have had such a neat prefiguring of Jesus…

(There’s lots more good stuff in the sermon too. Well worth a listen.)

I was listening to a sermon last night that, among other things, talked about not striving and trying to do things in our own strength, but trusting God to bring about the apparently-impossible.

What a great example this is of that. I can’t get my head around the idea of God sending an evil spirit, but whether he sent it or allowed it, the outcome is the same: Saul becomes tormented, his servants suggest a harpist (which seems fairly random), he tells them to find him one, and one of them just happens to be aware of David – a kid of no consequence who spends most of his time in the fields outside Bethlehem.

And so, David gets brought into the courts of the king and presumably gets a chance to learn some of the ins and outs of running a kingdom long before God places the job into his hands. Amazing.

God is much better at directing our paths than we are. Our task is simply to follow in obedience.

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